- Born
- Died
- Birth nameDavid Edwards
- "Delta blues" artist David "Honeyboy"--a nickname his sister gave him as a child--Edwards was born in Shaw, MS, in 1915. He taught himself to play the guitar as a boy by listening to such bluesmen as Tommy McClennan and Robert Petway. By age 14 he was playing in "juke joints" in the South with such artists as Big Joe Williams and Yank Rachell.
He made a few recordings for the Library of Congress sin 1942, but didn't begin to record commercially until 1951, when he recorded for the American Recording Co. as "Mr. Honey". Two years later he traveled to Chicago to record four songs for Chess Records, but only one of them, "Drop Down Mama", was ever released, and that wasn't until 1970. Edwards, however, continued to tour and play clubs--and, when necessary, on street corners--in Chicago, and would occasionally play the South. In the 1960s he began his recording career again, this time with Adelphi/Blue Horizon, and also started to play blues festivals. In the 1970s and 1980s he toured Europe and Japan.
He died of heart failure in Chicago in 2011.- IMDb mini biography by: frankfob2@yahoo.com
- Blues singer.
- Inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1996.
- Received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.
- The album "Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen -- Live in Dallas" won the 2007 Grammy Award for best traditional blues album. Edwards shared this award with Pinetop Perkins, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Henry Townsend.
- He was still playing 70 shows a year when he was in his 90s.
- [2008, in an Associated Press interview] Blues ain't never going anywhere. It can get slow, but it ain't going nowhere. You play a lowdown dirty shame slow and lonesome, my mama dead, my papa across the sea, I ain't dead but I'm just supposed to be blues. You can take that same blues, make it uptempo, a shuffle blues, that's what rock'n'roll did with it. So blues ain't going nowhere.
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